In 1974 Raymond Williams published Television: Technology and Cultural Form. In it, he introduced the concept of flow. Flow, he wrote, was "the defining characteristic of broadcasting, simultaneously as a technology and as a cultural form." It was the way the medium of television contoured its materials to meet and sustain the attentiveness of its viewers. In other words, flow is how networks try to hold onto their viewers from program to program, or from one segment of a program to another.

Imagine the following scenario: It's 1974. You are at home watching a this week's new episode of All in the Family. A commercial you loathe comes up. What do you do? Do you change the channel, or do you stay the course? In 1974, changing the channel meant potentially missing part of the show. And, if you watch TV regularly, you might begin to notice how sitcoms tend to break at moments of high tension--moments that are resolved right after commercials. You might even notice how they tend to begin with audio before visuals--as if they're luring you in.

This new way of structuring entertainment was analyzed and labeled: flow is meant to keep your attention glued to the channel despite the available distractions--commercial breaks, program changes, etc. Think of blocks like "Must See TV."

Years before flow, film did something similar. Did you know that Alfred Hitchcock insisted on a "no late admission" policy for the theaters screening Psycho? It was initially met with consternation, but it went on to become our current film admissions policy. Theaters now want you in your seats when the film starts, and they want you neither distracted nor distracting.

I'm talking about new forms of media and attention because, in many ways, shifts in media technology create shifts in attention patterns. These, in turn, require shifts in media. The medium is not the message; it is how the medium forces the media and the consumer to meet.

In two recent New York Times articles, we encounter just this problematic. The first, entitled "Finding Your Book Interrupted ... By the Tablet You Read It On," was published on March 4th. The second, titled "Miniature E-Books Let Journalists Stretch Legs," followed on March 6th. Both are interested with what kind of reading environment tablets offer us. 

Tablets are, of course, here to stay. Between December of 2011 and January of 2012 the number of adult owners of tablets doubled. They are increasingly becoming a part of our cultural firmament. But, in a culture where attention to media is almost universally adjudicated against the standard of reading a novels, what do we make of these new technologies?

The former article asks a simple question: how do we read books when tablets offer us so many competing things to look at. With a book on iPad, for example, Facebook is as easy to get to as  the next page. So...what's to stop a reader from sliding his or her finger to Facebook instead of the next page in To The Lighthouse? Increasingly, it seems, people and publishers are beginning to realize just this fact. "Forrester Research," the article states, "showed that 31 percent of publishers believed iPads and similar tablets were the ideal e-reading platform; one year ago, 46 percent thought so."

It's convenient to have everything available on just one tablet, but that also means that Netflix is as accessible as email. "The basic menu for the Kindle Fire," the article states, "offers links to video, apps, the Web, music, newsstand and books, effectively making books (once Amazon’s stock in trade) just another menu option."

Perhaps a tentative answer to this issue--that of what new forms will successfully meet the consumer's attentiveness on this new medium of consumption--was given just two days later. The former article discusses the "Kindle Single." Though not a great name, the Single is a novel idea. As the article explains, "They’re works of long-form journalism that seek out that sweet spot between magazine articles and hardcover books. Amazon calls them 'compelling ideas expressed at their natural length.'"

Perched somewhere between the brevity of a newspaper article and the length of book-length work, these Singles sound, oddly enough, exactly like some of the poppier writings one encounters in many academic journals.

Could it be that attention in the age of tablets is exactly enough to open new markets for academic writing? Who knows?

What I do know--70% of $1.99 for every Single sold will prove a mighty tempting offer for many academics whose work hasn't been selected by journals.